I’m not convinced that it’s impossible to build a modern OS in a way that’s properly modular and allows most functionality to be disabled entirely (as in never even loaded into memory).

Windows almost categorically can’t because it’s only ever been developed organically and is pathologically backwards compatible, which keeps it forever tied to past design decisions.

Linux could get a much closer but is hamstrung by monolithic kernel design which puts more functionality there.

You’d need a clean sheet design which positions most subsystems as discrete components.

> The surface area of stuff that an OS has to do today is absolutely massive, and the dependency graphs are poorly understood even by the engineers who work on those systems. Innocuous pieces of functionality have a way of becoming load-bearing over time

It’s not that huge. I use OpenBSD and the code is surprisingly approachable and readable. And even with no support for runtime modules, it’s pretty easy to customize and strip out whole features. Current complexity in something like linux is stretching the subsystems to support a huge array of use cases.

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If idle on Win 11 already pre-caches most-used apps like Chrome/FF and not on Linux, how can you accurately measure what true idle is?

You have to remember the Win (and MacOS) kernel is tuned to consumer desktop user use cases, while Linux kernel is tuned to server/DC use-cases.

That's why ~15 years ago when I was in uni, you'd get audio stutter when playing music/movies of spinning rust on linux while torrenting file on the same HDD, and not on Windows/MacOS, due to different queuing algorithms used thet prioritised audio decoding tasks over everything else, which Linux kernel out of the box didn't, unless you tinkered and changed it.

A tangent to this which annoys me is not specifically windows, but the way the ecosystem has evolved over the years, by guidance/enforcement or lack thereof from MS. Unless you're very careful about what applications you install and how you manage/monitor them, you can end up with a lot of background applications loaded each boot, each doing some combination of non-centralized updating itself or applications it manages, preloading, quick launch, etc.